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Course: Entrepreneurship > Unit 1
Lesson 15: Dave Gilboa & Neil Blumenthal - Co-founders & Co-CEOs of Warby ParkerIt was just mayhem
Created by Kauffman Foundation.
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Video transcript
- My name's Dave Gilboa, co-founder and co-CEO of Warby Parker. - I'm Neil Blumenthal, co-founder and co-CEO of Warby Parker. Warby Parker just took
off like a rocket ship. We hit our first year sales
targets in three weeks, sold out of our top 15
styles in four weeks, had a wait list of 20000 people. We were completely overwhelmed. - [Dave] We were full time students and we didn't have any employees, we didn't have an office. We're working at our apartments and we'd worked so hard
to get our website up that I think naively we
thought once it was up, we could relax a little bit and all of a sudden just
order started pouring in. - It was just mayhem. We basically had to stop going to class, so that way we could answer customer calls or respond to customer emails. We didn't even have sold out
functionality on the website. So one of the first calls, Dave calls our developers
like we gotta figure this out. We made a decision early on that we were gonna be
transparent with our customers and actually explain
to them what's going on that we are really sorry but
we've ran out of inventory. A core tenet of ours is just to always be truthful and honest, and if you do that hopefully
customers will like it and be grateful for that. - [Dave] I think we learned
two important lessons right around launch, one is that if you treat customers well good things will happen. We personally reached out to
every one of those customers and we gave away a lot of free glasses for people if we messed up their order or kept them waiting for
a certain amount of time. If you're just honest and
transparent with customers and show them that you care
that goes a really long way. And the second thing is just
the power of serendipity and good luck. One of our first customers called in, we'd taken about three
weeks to get him his glasses and at the time our customer
service line just went directly to all the four founder cell phones. - [Neil] Whoever would answer
first got the customer. - And our co-founder
Jeff picked up the phone and profusely apologized and said," we're overwhelmed by demand. "We'll give you a free pair of glasses go "to our website pick out
another pair we'll send that "for free I'll package it myself
and send it out tomorrow." And he said, "Well it
sounds like you're having "some logistics problems maybe I can help. "I'm the CEO of a publicly
traded logistics company." And the next week they
were our logistics partner and we still work with them today, where they handle all our logistics.